PixiEditor Devlog 7 - Fast and Furious
GPU acceleration, squashing bugs and closed beta testing.
GPU acceleration
There was this one thing that kept me awake during the nights. Our new node system was slow, using filters, creating effects and rendering bigger images took unacceptably long time.
Why was that? Well, because the very core of our rendering engine was CPU-based. Every pixel was executed on the CPU. This is a very slow process, especially when you have to do it for every pixel in the image.
For decades now, games and other applications have been using the GPU to process images. GPUs are much, much faster than CPUs when it comes to processing images. They are designed to do exactly that.
So far in PixiEditor 2.0 only GPU-accelerated thing was the frontend (the UI), but the whole processing engine of drawing and nodes was still on the CPU. Up until now. I've rewritten most of the rendering code to use the GPU. Whole rendering pipeline is GPU accelerated. The only system that still uses CPU is drawing system; however, it's not a huge problem, because we use chunky rendering.
CPU - Big reference layer
GPU - Big reference layer
CPU - Drawing 9999x9999
GPU - Drawing 9999x9999
CPU - Image with filter
GPU - Image with filter
I think the results speak for themselves. GPU acceleration is a huge step forward for PixiEditor 2.0, and I'm very happy with the results.
#MadeInPixiEditor2.0
We've made some examples of what you can do with PixiEditor 2.0
Procedural islands with seasons
Pond - "drill" brush
Stars
Auto outline
Closed beta testing
At the beginning of this month, we've started closed beta testing of PixiEditor 2.0. It's still ongoing, so if you want to join, you can do it here.
All above examples are available to play with in the beta version of PixiEditor 2.0, so don't wait and join us!
What's next?
Animations and nodes are getting more and more stable, useful and powerful. I am very excited with the progress we've made so far, and I can't wait to show you more. But for now, I need to focus on fixing bugs and making PixiEditor 2.0 as stable as possible before jumping into next big features.
Stay tuned for more updates!